Charles Crawford was British Ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw before leaving the Foreign Office in 2007 to become an international relations consultant and speechwriter. He is a founder member of The Ambassador Partnership. His own website is Charles Crawford and he is on Twitter @CharlesCrawford

Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and the new face of Europe

Mean streets: an opposition supporter at a rally in Kiev’s Independence Square. What awaits a nation of 45 million citizens? (Photo: Nikitin Maxim)

After the fighting, a further struggle to shape Ukraine’s national identity could well pit east against west

The ghoulishly violent confrontations on the streets of Kiev force to the top of the international agenda three existential questions that most of us prefer not to think about. What is Europe? Where is Europe? And who decides?

For centuries, the answers to these questions came through the rise and fall of different empires. Then the First World War led to the implosion of imperial Europe, but put in place no clear structures to replace it. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia agreed the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact to redefine central Europe on their greedy terms, launching the Second World War. After that, uneasy calm descended on Europe during the Cold War. Western European countries set in motion far-reaching economic and security integration through the European Union and Nato. Meanwhile, central and eastern European countries found themselves under Soviet hegemony. This unnatural combination of democratic growth and communist stagnation lasted for 45 years.

Then, in 1990, something extraordinary happened. A new phase of imperial disintegration began, as Soviet domination from Moscow abruptly ended. Some 25 new countries with varying claims to be European popped up like mushrooms. How, if at all, could they be accommodated within existing European political and security structures?

If ever there was a time for bold, visionary and generous thinking about European identity, that moment had arrived. There was some talk of radical transformation, moving far beyond the EU and instead creating a vast new shared economic space stretching from Warrington across to Vladivostok and beyond.

But it came to nothing. Perversely, the very fact that western Europe was now so integrated meant that many vested interests preferred to leave things as they were: what would happen to the Common Agricultural Policy and all those plumply subsidised western European farmers if anyone across the former communist space could grow and sell cheap vegetables anywhere in Europe? And in any case, how could it possibly work? What form of governance for this vast economic area could bring together round one table as equal partners Russia, Germany and Liechtenstein?

Some governments, with successive British administrations to the fore, insisted that western Europe’s economic and security success had to be exported to central and eastern Europe. This view prevailed. But France, with other member states, did not much like it. In particular, Paris for years insisted that in official EU documents Ukraine could not be described as “a European country”, since under EU treaties that very expression opened the way for Ukraine in theory to join the European Union sooner or later.

The significant EU enlargement in 2004 brought Poland and other former Warsaw Pact countries into the union. They, of course, threw their weight behind greater integration with Ukraine and other new countries that previously had been within the Soviet Union.

Thus we arrive at the almost medieval battles on the streets of Kiev in the past few weeks. Where does Ukraine fit?

If you’re a patriotic Russian in Moscow, you don’t need to be a raving nationalist to find this trend of European events disturbing. It’s bad enough that Russia’s cultural influence and political reach are on the retreat. It’s much worse that millions of fellow Slavs and, above all, Ukrainians seem to be rejecting their own history and traditional respect for Russian leadership by favouring integration with western Europe and its decadent “multiculturalism”. Where is this going to end? Could Russia itself, a patchwork quilt of scores of ethnic communities and administrative units stretching over 11 time zones, start to disintegrate?

Vladimir Putin has invested heavily in trying to stop the rot. Moscow has actively supported conservative political forces in Ukraine that favour a much more cautious approach to integration with western Europe. Plus Russia has tried to create a rival attraction, a Eurasian Economic Union bringing together countries emerging from the former Soviet Union that tries to capture the benefits of economic integration that happened under the USSR but without the politically oppressive apparatus. Moscow has invited Ukraine to join this new formation, without years of boring if not patronising European form-filling. It has also offered generous economic terms and loans to speed up the process. What more could Ukrainians reasonably want?

This ambitious policy is crumbling. Unfortunately for Moscow, millions of Ukrainians see it as a way to entrench startling levels of corruption, Russian domination and clumsy Soviet-style manipulation. Who are the more attractive economic and political partners? Germany, the UK, France and all the other European democracies, or Belarus and Kazakhstan? Ukrainians may face a long and arduous path to join the EU, but at least the result (and the journey itself) will be pretty transparent and conducted in a spirit of substantive democratic partnership.

The Ukraine problem now poses a genuinely dangerous threat to European security. A case can be made for redrawing the map of this part of Europe to allow those parts of Ukraine that wish to integrate closely with Russia to do so, leaving the rest to move closer towards western Europe. Making any such policy happen through calm negotiation will be next to impossible. Moscow is already accusing the opposition in Ukraine of “acting illegally” in trying to topple President Yanukovych. Does this open the way to Russia intervening to “protect” those elements that call for protection against such illegality?

It’s not likely that Russia will want to swallow a formal partition of Ukraine, even if that option were available. That would amount to conceding that much of the country is falling away from Russian influence. It’s more likely that Moscow will try to “punish” Ukraine for its ingratitude by creating a situation in which it is effectively divided and unable to function as a coherent unit, except on Moscow’s terms. In other words, another frozen conflict in the former Soviet space, but involving millions of people and with direct economic and security problems for eastern and central Europe. Remember where those energy pipelines run.

Western European governments watching this grim situation draw no comfort from it. The fact that Ukraine is now an unambiguously “European” problem may be an important success for British, German and Polish diplomacy. But that does not help much. So what should happen next? Ukraine is big, with some 45 million people. Even if the EU wanted to accelerate Ukraine’s membership, how best to do it? At a time of economic austerity, where is the money going to be found to invest in reforming Ukraine quickly?

Above all, does anyone in the EU need the appalling problems that will arise from trying to drive this policy forward in the face of explicit Russian opposition? In practice, Russia cares much more about Ukraine than the EU does, and is ready to invest time, resources and sheer ruthlessness in trying to achieve a result that favours Moscow.

The wise way forward now is to look again at some of those bold ideas that emerged when the Cold War ended, and open discussions on a new historical deal between the EU, Ukraine and Russia complementing the Transatlantic Free Trade Area discussions now proceeding between Brussels and Washington.

Security guarantees might be included, ruling out further enlargement of Nato and other confidence-building gestures. The core of this process would be a shared understanding that both the EU and Russia need to modernise their attitudes, with the European Union also committing to changing its structures to create flexible membership-lite options for countries such as Ukraine and Turkey and maybe, in due course, Russia itself. Who knows, maybe this process could also help the UK itself define a different relationship.

Such a project would be fiendishly complicated to set up. It would drag on for years. But it would have significant strategic advantages. After centuries of war and misery, all Europeans at long last would be sitting around a table to work out where and what Europe actually is. And all European governments would have a say in deciding the outcome, rather than letting violent events on the streets of Ukraine – and perhaps later in western or central Europe and up into Russia if this one is badly mishandled – take their course.